I’m a firm believer in giving away the beginning of a book for free, especially if you’re an unknown quantity. After all, if you were in a bookstore you could flip through the first few pages and get a feel for the story. Thanks, Malcolm!

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Unbeknownst to me, Silent Symmetry sneakily popped up in Barnes & Noble’s online store for Nook books sometime over the weekend. For those of you outside the US, Barnes & Noble is a humongous bookstore chain and the Nook is their ereader. (Canadians: think Indigo and Kobo.) Nook gives authors tremendous reach, but since lowly Canucks can’t distribute directly to the Barnes & Noble online store, I needed help from the helpful folks at Smashwords. Here’s a clickable screenshot that will take you to Silent Symmetry’s page on BN.com.

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My psychological mystery The New Sense is a free Kindle download today. Montrealers who read it will recognize a host of places (and maybe even some people).

I have to get back to promoting the promotion now but if you want to know more, either click on the cover to read an excerpt on Amazon.com or watch this interview I did last year: LINK TO ME TALKING IN FRONT OF MY BOOKCASE.

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Yes, that was the best headline I could come up with on a beautiful Sunday afternoon. It took a week, but someone at Apple has finally run over to the iBookstore and breathlessly handed the shiny new Silent Symmetry EPUB file I uploaded last Sunday to the iBookstorekeeper, who then lovingly placed it in a prime spot on their shelves while wearing white kid gloves.

This is an Apple-esque screenshot. I must now go outside and enjoy the sun with my kids.

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Although the words “blurb reveal” sound kinda icky, like discovering goo oozing out of a mystery bag in the fridge, please don’t stop reading. Because this is the exciting moment when a drum roll happens in your mind (I just triggered it through the power of suggestion, didn’t I?) and I present the promotional text for my contemporary fiction novel The New Sense. So, without further ado (this having been a rare case of “goo ooze ado”) here is the aforementioned blurb:

Summer, 2002. Single, carefree Montreal waitress Sara meets an intriguing out-of-towner whom she calls B― in her quirky private journal. They hang out. They get close. He’s like no one she’s ever met. In fact… there’s something very strange about him, almost as though he’s psychic. She probes deeper. He finally opens up to her: he’s a genetic oddity with an extra sense acquired through a twist of evolutionary fate. Although initially skeptical, she soon falls in love with him and starts to believe his story.

Shortly after Sara unexpectedly becomes pregnant, B― reveals that a former friend is pressuring him to undergo genetic testing at a pseudo-governmental research lab outside Chicago. B― is tempted to go there. What if there are others like him? Could their unborn child have the same “new sense”?

Suddenly, B― disappears without a trace. Sara puts her journal online as a blog in the desperate hope that someone, somewhere can help her find him. As her pregnancy progresses and the days turn into weeks, she is forced to ask herself if anything she knows about him is really true, and whether their son will ever know his father. Realizing that the lab’s shady operatives are now following her every move, Sara begins to fear for her own safety. The suspense mounts as she wonders: is it me they’re after… or my baby?

Part journal, part blog, part email chain, The New Sense is an unusually structured page-turner with a unique mystery told from the perspective of an engaging female character.

I also have a shorter version of the blurb for various purposes, but this one certainly captures the content and spirit of the book. It was much, much harder to write than the blurb for Silent Symmetry because The New Sense really is quite an unusual book. If I had said that it’s an epistolary epistemological novel, I’m pretty sure that no one would ever read it, no matter that it’s an accurate description. I’ve also written a one-liner (sometimes called a strapline or logline) that goes like this:

What if the man you love isn’t who he says he is? Or worse… he really is.

The New Sense is only available on Amazon as a Kindle ebook for now, but don’t forget, if you want to read it on some other device, the Kindle software is free and works very well on a phone or tablet (I test all my books on various devices).

Phew! I’m glad that’s done. Now to write the rest of the lyrics to my upcoming international club hit Goo Ooze Ado. Say it out loud a couple of times and you’ll start moving to the beat, guaranteed.

Thanks to Alex and Jen for invaluable input on my blurb. I mean valuable input. I mean, I didn’t pay them but it was worth it. For me.

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Further evidence of independent publishing being treated as a legitimate segment of the industry arrived earlier this month as the first monthly Smashwords indie bestseller list appeared on the Publishers Weekly website and in the PW print magazine.

The only downside to this news for a self-published author like me is that Smashwords sales figures are only a portion of book sales. For example, any sales of Silent Symmetry through Amazon, Apple or the Kobo store aren’t reflected by Smashwords since I chose to distribute my book to those retailers by myself. So it remains to be seen whether the mainstream media can figure out a way to truly capture across-the-board sales figures for independently published ebooks. Until then, this is a huge step in the right direction.

Publishers Weekly logo is protected by copyright and reproduced here under a fair use provision under Canadian copyright law.

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In this post last month I commented on the fact that my Silent Symmetry free Kindle ebook promotion was far more successful in the US than in Canada and the UK:

On another note, if any self-published authors out there have the slightest idea why the Silent Symmetry ebook was downloaded over 2,500 times last week in the US but only 9 times in Canada and 58 in the UK, I’d love to hear their theories! Since Facebook, Twitter and blogs are essentially international, I can’t for the life of me figure out why these figures are so disproportionately skewed in favour of the US. More copies were downloaded in India than in Canada where I live and wrote the book! As Jerry Seinfeld used to say, “What’s up with that?”

Well, Jerry, I think I’ve found the answer. I had never tried out website ranking site Alexa.com before, but yesterday I used it to check on the readership stats of a couple of indie publishing blogs (basically to figure out the potential reach of writing a guest post for them). Then, for the heck of it, I entered the Goodreads URL. Within seconds I had the answer to my conundrum. And I might have found an extra answer too! Scrolling down the Alexa page for Goodreads, I saw this graph and accompanying information:

I don’t know why this appears so small. Just click on it to enlarge. Sorry!

There you have it! 42% of Goodreads visitors come from the US, while only 3% are from England and 2% from Canada. Tellingly, giving my original observation, 16% come from India. All this leads to one inescapable conclusion: the Goodreads ad campaign that I ran during the promotion attracted far more readers who then downloaded a free copy than all of the tweeting and coverage on blogs combined.

Hold on a second, I hear you say – if that’s the case, and there are about 10 times as many Goodreads visitors from the US than the UK, how come the book was downloaded 50 times more often by Americans?

Good question! And the answer is also the extra bonus answer to my original question: First off, a chunk of those 2,500 Americans might well have heard about the freebie through sources other than Goodreads. Fair enough. And maybe Silent Symmetry also appeals more to Americans than to Brits. Also fair enough. The crucial thing is that Amazon’s free ebook charts create a chain reaction that tips the balance further and further in favour of a popular book (or at least their charts did until they were nerfed earlier this month; a topic I’ll be blogging about soon) because once a book appears in the top 10 of one of their charts, its visibility increases exponentially, which leads to more downloads until a critical mass is reached and there’s a nucl-ebook explosion. Groan.

Since Amazon’s charts are separate for each territory, the exponential impact of Silent Symmetry’s top-10 appearance in the US due to the higher Goodreads ad visibility wasn’t mirrored in the UK, where the Goodreads ads didn’t reach nearly as many people in the first place and the book only hovered in the top 100 freebies on Amazon.co.ok, thus creating no critical mass.

As for Canada, it just shows how Facebook isn’t really all that powerful for a free ebook promotion.

If anyone’s still reading at this point… well done! You deserve a free ebook. Sign up for my mailing list using the link at the top-right of the page and I’ll send you one.